Part 2: Different people, different safety Continuing our reflections on the last five years. In part one, we explored the name psychological safety itself, and here in part two, we get into diversity, myths, the proliferation of bad advice, and […]
Measurement
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2025 – the largest global survey on psychological safety ever! Psychological safety is the core ingredient behind high-performing, innovative, and happy teams. It shapes whether we feel safe speaking up, sharing ideas, […]
Psychological Safety Research Pulse Last week, we asked “Typically, how familiar are people in your workplace with the concept of psychological safety?”. 121 people responded, and the distribution across the whole sample looked like this. The most common responses were […]
Exploring The Psychological Safety Index (PSI) (Trademark: The Fearless Organisation) Psychological safety is one of those concepts that’s easy to grasp intuitively, but much harder to measure. We can usually sense when a team feels open, trusting, and collaborative – […]
A team is only as safe as the least safe person When measuring the psychological safety in a team, we often are asked which measurement should be considered the “group measurement,” given that different individuals will likely experience rather different […]
Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law, and the Cobra Effect. We’ve mentioned Goodhart’s Law a few times in previous newsletters about measuring psychological safety, alongside its siblings, Campbell’s Law and The Cobra Effect. I thought it would be useful to do a […]
How psychological safety emerges and changes over time in the workplace. Given that psychological safety itself is a relatively young field, there’s not a huge amount of published research that addresses the longitudinal dynamics of psychological safety in the workplace: […]
We love to measure stuff, don’t we? Maybe it’s human nature, but we seem to have a strong desire to make the intangible tangible, and we tend (or at least many of us do) to believe in the robustness of […]
Team performance isn’t the only reason that we foster psychological safety. We also do it because we want people to feel fulfilled in their jobs, we don’t want people to leave a team because they don’t feel included, we want people to experience less unnecessary stress and have greater mental wellbeing, we want to foster greater diversity and inclusion. Ultimately, we foster psychological safety because it’s fundamentally the right thing to do.
Psychological Safety in 2023 Thanks so much for all your support, feedback, encouragement, ideas, insights and collaboration over 2023! It’s genuinely a privilege to be able to do this work, and I appreciate every single one of you. I recently […]
Employment Protections and Psychological Safety You may recall back in issue 121, we released a small survey on employment rights, protections and policies. It was a preliminary, pilot study intended to see if there was anything worth investigating further in […]
Measuring psychological safety? Here are some tips on choosing the right tool for the job. As awareness of the importance of psychological safety in the workplace increases, there is a corresponding increase in the number of psychometric tools, applications and […]
Statistical Process Control and Understanding Variation In a chat with a great client this week, we got talking about different approaches to measurement and metrics. I introduced the concept of Statistical Process Control (SPC), so that’s what this week’s newsletter […]
Data Visualisation In the psychsafety.com measurement workshop we cover a lot: research ethics, quantitative/qualitative approaches, longitudinal vs cross-sectional studies, formulating research questions, survey design, and communicating our findings. As part of that, we look at data visualisation, including this classic example: The Broad Street […]
Welcome to The State of Psychological Safety Survey 2023 – the annual survey of The Psychological Safety Newsletter. This is your chance to join thousands of voices, share your experiences, and inform the content of the next year of articles, resources, […]
Read more about Goodhart’s Law, Campbell’s Law and The Cobra Effect here.
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You are amazing. This week discusses some things to think about before measuring psychological safety. Measuring Psychological Safety I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about measuring psychological safety, and thought it’d be good to […]
It might be sometimes hard to tell whether people in a team feel psychologically safe, or how safe they feel. The more you hear these phrases, more psychologically safe they’re likely to be. Indicators of Psychological Safety in a Team […]
Psychological safety is “The belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson, 1999) Also stated as “A belief that […]
Westrum’s Cultural Typologies Dr Ron Westrum wrote in the BMJ Quality & Safety Journal in 2004 about The Three Typologies of Organisational Culture. He was looking at how information flows through an organisation, and he considered that because information flow is influential and indicative of other aspects […]
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You rock. This week includes Neurodivergence, Google, Grout, Tigers and Elephants, Pre-Mortems, Equity, Accountability, Gendered Social Biases, and Cognitive Load.If you enjoy reading this newsletter, please share it via your social networks […]
Welcome to the psychological safety newsletter and thanks for subscribing. You rock. I’m taking a break next week, so this week’s epic issue includes a great selection of fabulous podcasts to help you make it through the holiday period 🙂 This […]
As a leader, or a member of a team, you’re probably pretty good at creating a psychologically safe environment where performance is high and people can flourish. Providing clarity of expectations, goals, team behaviours, and exhibiting generative leadership practices may […]
This week we have education, healthcare, sports coaching, Polyvagal Theory and the HSE Culture Ladder. And Captain Picard, obviously. Psychological Safety In the Workplace:Stimpunks are a group of former technologists turned “wannabe-sociologists interpreting and applying the work of experts”, are autistic, ADHD, bipolar, […]
The Psychological Safety Book Club Updated July 2025. We love nothing more than reading fantastic books that help us to understand (and explain) concepts around psychological safety even better. The list below includes many of our current favourite books about […]
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